Optimise your multilingual content and translation strategy to reach a wider audience
90% of data on the internet has been created since 2016 and translation budgets simply can’t keep up with this pace of growth. The choice is not whether to translate or not. Instead, you need to take a strategic approach to your content, work within your budget constraints and decide which content is most important to your audience.
Does it demand high quality human translation? Does it have a shorter time to live and may be suitable for machine translation, such as rolling social media content? Getting the right translation strategy in place answers these questions.
Build A Smarter Translation Strategy
Not all content is created equal. By carrying out a complete evaluation of your content we can help you decide what requires maximum attention from skilled professional translators and transcreators, and what content may be suitable for machine translation, either with or without human editing. Taking a smarter approach to translation allows you to maximise the impact of a finite translation budget.
Professional Translation, backed by technology
Your highest value content deserves skilled, human translation. We select dedicated translation teams for each of our customers based on their subject matter expertise and writing style. This helps the team tune into your content, maintaining accuracy while maximising effectiveness.
Applying technologies such as Translation Memory and Terminology Management assists the translation process by searching for and applying previously translated “content matches” in order to expedite the translation process even when using professional translators for the translation.
Professional human translation is most relevant for long-life and high-profile content, for example printed content such as brochures, or for high-profile online content. This can also be useful for high-value translations such as contracts and presentations.
Machine Translation, backed by professional translators
Machine Translation (MT) is getting better all the time, and whether it’s content you might otherwise not translate, or high-volume content well-suited to MT, it’s time to take Machine Translation seriously.
We use customer-specific translation engines to power our Machine Translation process. Your existing translations and terminology help us build a high-quality Machine Translation Engine (MTE) which will do a better job translating your content category and house style. Professional translation teams edit your machine translations to correct any errors in style, syntax or terminology.
Our proprietary Translation Laundry technology helps to turn even smaller Translation Memories and Terminology Databases into usable training data. Combined with our clever Terminology Management software, we think you’ll be impressed.
Wo(man) and Machine, In Perfect Harmony?
An optimised translation strategy uses a mixture of human, machine and hybrid translation workflows to power your mulitilingual strategy. This approach gives you the best shot at meeting tough timescales while keeping inside your budget.
The translation process is more than just the actual translation activity. Integrating translation into your marketing workflow and ensuring a frictionless process is key to your strategy. If you’re ready to build a translation strategy which helps you reach your goals, talk to us today.
Our free translation strategy consultation will provide you a clear, achievable translation strategy we can build together.
What else do you need to consider?
Actually translating your content is of course the key area we focus on, but how do you know whether what you have written in your own language is going to have the same resonance in another language?
Tone of voice, cultural references and sensitivies need to be taken into account, and that is where transcreation comes in.
Transcreation or Translation?
Content with a long “time to live” and in the most prominent locations – think of your homepage for instance – needs professional human translation. The question is whether to translate or transcreate.
Partly this is a question of budget (transcreation costs more), but first consider whether your content will be suitable after translation for your target market. The main question is whether you content needs some adaptation to take into account cultural references, humour or taste. If so you need to set aside a bit more of your budget for transcreation.
If not, human translation with the right guidance around terminology and context will do just fine.
How about SEO? Print?
There are a lot of different scenarios that probably apply to your business. Consider International SEO for instance, maybe you’ve thought about translating your keywords. To have a successful search strategy in your target markets, you also need to consider local keyword research as an integral part of your wider translation strategy.
If you get involved with print materials like packaging, merchandising or brochures you also need to take into account a finite physical print area. These are all challenges that we can help you weave into a smarter translation strategy.
Is this really different from translating my online content?
Absolutely! Translating printed content brings with it a whole new set of challenges.
One common problem is expansion rate – the tendency for the translation to be longer than the original text. German, for example, often combines several words into one creating interesting examples such as Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän – “Danube steamship company captain”, as you’re no doubt wondering! Managing the space available may mean that creative editing of the source text may be required. Conversely when translating into Japanese, a single character can sometimes replace an entire European word, resulting in the text taking up far less room in your design.
Finally integrating with cloud storage solutions such as Dropbox or Sharepoint allows us to seamlessly edit your files in their native format and save translated documents into the same storage locations.
Ready to develop your translation strategy?
Technology is moving forward so fast, but can you trust it to deliver the results you need? What place should human translation have in your strategy? How can you improve your translation workflow?
Our free translation strategy review will provide you a clear, achievable translation strategy we can build together.
Book your free translation strategy review
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